4 Things You Should Do if Your Drive for Success is Taking a Toll on Your Mental Health

There is no cookie-cutter formula for success. Success can look different depending on who you talk to. Some people pursue wealth while others chase after accolades. Then there are those who define success by the quality of their relationships with family and friends. In addition, others focus on their health and physique as a measure of success or self-worth. 

Often a person’s pursuit of success will depend on factors including what they feel they need to be okay with being who they are, or to get the love and approval they desire, or to meet expectations they believe they should achieve.

Whatever your definition of success, it can be helpful to know what motivates your pursuit for “more”— especially when a drive for success may be taking a toll on your mental health and ruining your quality of life. 

Below you’ll find four recommendations for how to regain a healthier perspective in your quest for success:

1. Be mindful of your daily stress levels and how you’re feeling

There is no point in reaching a goal of success if you wear yourself down day after day in the process. As is often said, happiness is a journey, not a destination. If your pursuit of success has become so stressful that it only feels like drudgery, it may be time to take some self-care measures. 

Poorly managed chronic stress can be as bad for your mental health as post-traumatic stress by negatively affecting your mind, thinking, body, behaviors, and relationships.

Chronic stress also impairs cognitive abilities and is associated with greater impulsiveness. That’s because we humans have a very sophisticated, built-in alarm system of sorts. This highly evolved stress response is designed to warn us of potential danger. 

In the face of a perceived threat, our body releases endorphins like adrenaline and cortisol. These chemicals prepare the body for “fight or flight”— a survival mechanism that can be incredibly handy when you’re staring down a lion on the African savannah. When you’ve got a big presentation tomorrow that you’ve had zero time to prepare for? Less so.

When your body gets accustomed to living in a near-constant state of fight or flight, your sleep is one of the first things to go. You’re then more likely to turn to pills, alcohol, or food to feel better. You also feel tired all the time and more inclined to be short with others or retreat altogether. Consequently, your relationships suffer.

Sleep, health and relationships are helpful barometers of stress levels, among other things. Pay attention to how you’re doing in these areas. Often, just a tweak here or there—to sleep and/or other lifestyle habits—can be a game changer for stress management.

“It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.” – Bruce Lee

2. Strive for balance in all areas of your life, even if that balance seems elusive at times

If you’re regularly hitting home runs in one area of your life (such as in your profession) but keep striking out in every other domain (your relationships, health, etc.), you’d be better served exploring ways to juggle all of the aspects of your life. Don’t just be focused on one area of living.

The ideal is to strike a healthy balance between the physical, emotional, spiritual, career, and relationship spheres of life.

When we over-focus on one area, the other areas can suffer. A case in point: the workaholic who works all the time and soon finds they have nothing else; their health suffers, they are lonely, they don’t take time for their emotional and spiritual self and only keep draining the well until there is little left. This is called “burnout.” When you’re suffering from burnout, you are like a car without gas in the tank, you grind to a halt unexpectedly.

3. Seek greater flexibility, by cultivating an attitude of acceptance

People with a higher quality of life often report they have flexibility. They adjust to situations rather than ask situations to adjust to them. They do not demand their way, ask others to be the way they “should” be (but aren’t now) or set unreasonable expectations regarding outcomes.

We are all just human beings interacting in a vast and complicated world, so there is freedom in accepting the reality that we cannot simply “will” ourselves into success. If you can learn to accept and not fight life on its terms, but to adjust and respond in a healthy way, you’ll find that you’ll be better at dealing with the setbacks and issues you face each day.

Often a regular practice of mindfulness can be helpful at inculcating greater acceptance of oneself and the world around us. With that acceptance comes greater flexibility.

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” – Albert Einstein

4. If fear is motivating your pursuit of success, work on letting it go

If fear were a person, it would only be selfish and self-interested. Fear assumes there are scarce resources and that you have to get yours or else be left out. When fear is operative, you constantly look for the next bad thing to happen; and your thinking, planning and coping skills are compromised because of your fear response.

Fear is not a motivator, it is a de-motivator. It is a hamster wheel that constantly keeps going, making us run for our lives without a break. There is always something else for us to be afraid of.

You would never knowingly instill fear in a child and tell them that is the ticket to success.  Instead, you would try to comfort, inspire, problem-solve and give them a feeling of self-worth and confidence. The same interventions work well for most of us grown-ups. If your success is driven by fears of failure or of not being good enough or of letting others down, it may be time to do some soul searching.

Maybe consider consulting a life coach or seeing a therapist. Not even the greatest fantasy of “having arrived” is worth achieving if that process is driven by what you’re afraid of.

Does your mental health ever take a toll because of your drive towards success? Share your thoughts and beliefs with us below! We’d love to know.

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https://addicted2success.com/success-advice/4-things-you-should-do-if-your-drive-for-success-is-taking-a-toll-on-your-mental-health/

5 Secrets to Building a Strong and Dominant Sales Team

For the past 10 years, I have been working with this multinational company as the head of the sales department. In my 10 years of experience, I’ve realized that having a strong team of employees is what makes a business stand. If your team is weak and uncooperative, you can never grow your business or reach success.

For every business, the sales team happens to be the backbone. Ask why? Well, that’s where the profits and revenue come from. If you don’t have a strong and dominant sales team at work, things are going to be really difficult.

In this guide, I will share with you the 5 key secrets to building a strong sales team:

1. Selflessness

Ego is one of the elements that lead you to your downfall. If you want cooperation from your team members, you need to be selfless. Having unnecessary ego can make you look bossy, so you need to show selflessness to be a successful leader. Selflessness is one of the most critical elements of building a lasting team.

When you are working for a company, whether big or small, you cannot always take credit for the success that has been achieved with the help of your team. The success you have is because of the joint cooperation of your team. As a good team leader, you need to be selfless and share successes with all your team members.

After all, you alone are not responsible for the success. Everyone contributed equal efforts and therefore, they should be given credit too. Sadly, most team leaders don’t realize the value of their team and try to grab onto the limelight alone. This is where you are betraying your team. Try to be selfless with your team, and you will see the difference in performance.

2. Understanding and appreciating your individual roles

If you want a better outcome from your team you need to first understand and appreciate your individual values. Being a team leader is not easy. Your team looks up to you for guidance and the right advice. When you look at the bigger picture, you should be able to picture yourself in a position where you have sacrificed your time and credit to support your team.

Let’s say, you have a big task to handle. You instruct your team on what needs to be done and then engage yourself in leisure activities. This is not the way to support your team. As a good leader, you should be sacrificing your time too and work with them to achieve success.

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” – John Quincy Adams

3. Improve communication on priorities

Communication is very important when you are working with your team. I have seen many team leaders who only communicate when there is a need. If that’s how you handle your team, you will never be able to establish a connection. You need to make your team feel more like your friends rather than your employees.

This kind of relationship can be established only when you leave communication open. Your team members should be able to communicate with you whenever it’s needed.

Try to be a part of the team instead of bossing them around. Don’t make your team feel like they are below you. You should treat everyone equally with respect, because only then can you expect productivity and performance from them.

Also, having proper communication can solve problems both big and small. This is why many of the top companies focus so much on improving the communication line between the employees, team leaders, and bosses.

4. Focus on your KPI’s

By KPI, I mean your key performance indicators. Focus more on those who are actually giving their 100%. Appreciate them for their good work. Set them as examples before other members of your team. However, that doesn’t mean you will neglect the rest of your team.

You should appreciate the best performers and encourage others to do the same. That’s how you run your team. You need to maintain a balance between the two categories of performers.

“Successful leaders see the opportunities in every difficulty rather than the difficulty in every opportunity.” – Reed Markham

5. Hunger to attain success

You need to have the hunger to attain success. However, you alone cannot make everything happen and that’s why you need to encourage your team to be equally passionate about their work. You need to show them the meaning of success so that they put in 100% to be successful.

What you should do is use yourself as a good example before them. When they see their leader dedicated to his work and working for success, they will follow you too. Work together and achieve the impossible. You and your team both need to have the same level of hunger to attain success.

These five elements can help you to build a strong sales team. They are the blood and soul of your company. Therefore, make sure that you are paying full attention to them. If you found this article helpful, share it with your friends and acquaintances. They may also find it useful.

What about this article resonated most with you and why? Share your thoughts with us below!

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https://addicted2success.com/entrepreneur-profile/5-secrets-to-building-a-strong-and-dominant-sales-team/

5 Key Steps to Becoming a Successful Blogger

Blogging…the great form of getting your thoughts onto the web while being informative or entertaining, or both! If you’re new to the whole blogging scene and want ideas before you start your blogging adventure, keep reading because there’s some simple, yet effective steps.

1. Consistency Is Key

The more consistent the better. Posting content at a minimum of once or twice a week is when Google and other search engines will start to notice your activity and start to rank you. If you are lazy and just publish whenever you want, Google won’t be so sure of that and won’t rank you anywhere near as much if you were to be consistent.

Quick note, to be consistent means to still have great content. Don’t get sloppy because not only will your readers notice but guess who will notice? Yes, Google. This is the first step and one of the most important steps to becoming a good blogger.

2. Links Don’t Always Mean You’ll Rank

Don’t just put in any links because it’s a “source” and fills out your blog more. Linking out can sometimes damage your rank, not improve it, even if it’s relevant, and here’s why! The reasoning is because you need to make sure the website your referring/sourcing back to looks established and professional.

Another reason is that if you go onto a blog and see links left, right, and center, it looks like spam and unprofessional, not to mention it looks like you haven’t put any effort into your own content and just found relevant content and spammed them into your content.

“If you want to continually grow your blog, you need to learn to blog on a consistent basis.” – Neil Patel

3. Spread the Word

In this day and age, with the greatness that is the internet, spreading the word about your blog hasn’t been easier! Pinterest is one of my favorites. Using Pinterest is one effective way to quickly gain a lot of attention, and here’s what I do to increase traffic looking for related blogs and content that I’m putting out.

As Pinterest is considered a search engine and not as much of a social media platform, it generates a lot of organic free traffic. Additionally, it’s super easy to use. The beauty of it is that you can link back to your website from posting great looking pictures/graphics to appeal to an audience searching for relevant content.

To put into perspective how great Pinterest is, I’ve had Pinterest up for around 1 month and have been posting pins back to my website here and there, not putting in as much as I should actually. Want to know how many people I reach organically? 2,600 organic people will see my own pins I have put on Pinterest that link back to the relevant blogs on my website and that’s just after 1 month of putting a few pins on here and there using Canva for the great looking pins. I would advise you to look into some YouTube videos on Pinterest too before it gets too saturated/competitive.

Quora is another one of my favorites. Quora is a Q&A type of website, where people will ask questions they want answered. As long as you have an account, you can answer those questions. So, how does this benefit you? As long as you provide a great answer to someone’s question, you can link back to your website/blog that will be relevant to your content.

For example, let’s say your blog is about photography and there’s a question about which is the best starter DSLR camera for a beginner. Great, you have a blog that is relevant to that question, go in and answer it, give your opinions on a few cameras and then you can mention, “hey, I’ve done a full-blown blog on this topic which would be more informative for you here”. Then, link it in as a hyperlink so it looks cleaner than just posting it as a full link.

Now that you’ve posted the link in your answer, anyone who searches for an answer on Quora about the best beginner DSLR cameras and comes across the original posters question will see your answer in the answers section. There’s a possibility they will click on your link over to your blog, and there you have it, more FREE organic traffic.

4. Guest Posting

Guest posting is where you find a website similar to yours that has more authority and traffic than yours. Check to see if the website you’re interested in accepts guest posts (usually you will find a link in the header or footer for this). Once you know they accept guest posts, write an article that you haven’t already published and if they accept your guest post then you will get their traffic laying eyes on your post.

The beauty of this is that you can link back to your website through the article you submitted on their website or in the Author Bio section and once their traffic reads through your article, if they like it, they will click through to your site to check out the other content on there.

You will have traffic stumbling upon your post that links back to your website, which can lead to more traffic on your website and then you gain more authority through that, which means higher ranking in the long run. 

This means that the website you guest posted for gets good, relatable free content for their visitors and you get free traffic to your article and website. Everyone ends up happy.

“The process for finding, creating, and consuming information has fundamentally changed with the advent of the web and the rise of blogging.” – Ryan Holiday

5. Repeat

This is as important as all the above steps combined. To be consistent, you need to repeatedly keep posting your content. To get your website name and content out there, you need to link out. (although still be cautious as stated above).

You need to be active and repeat what you do on the above-mentioned Pinterest and Quora within your niche. Additionally, you need to get those guest posts out there, even if you get one a week because that’s going to add up to a lot of exposure in the long run. Repeat, repeat and repeat.

This is not a “short cut” guide to become a successful blogger, it is steps to continuously grow your content far and wide, so that all can find and enjoy your content you put out. 

Do you have a blog? If so, share it with us in the comments below! We’d love to look at it!

from
https://addicted2success.com/success-advice/5-key-steps-to-becoming-a-successful-blogger/

10 Things You Can Start Doing Today to Succeed With ZERO Talent

Sometimes you see someone great and we say they’re talented and that’s how they got there. We put ourselves in victim mode  when there’s so much we can do to produce results and become successful.

Here are 10 things you can do even if you have no talent at all:

1. Being on Time

Time is the most valuable commodity so it’s disrespectful to yourself and others if you waste it. Being on time is something that is very much in your control. People who are always late underestimate how much time it takes to get ready and go somewhere. It’s a habit which is formed from a lack of discipline. Seriously I would know. I used to be late all the time. These days not so much because I’ve decided to consciously change that and I’m still working on it.

2. Work Ethic

This is a prerequisite to becoming successful. You reap what you sow in life. Think about people like Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Will Smith, Conor McGregor. They all have one thing in common, an insane work ethic. No matter how talented you are, if you don’t have this then you’ll never realise your full potential.

3. Effort

Putting maximum effort into everything you do works in conjunction with your work ethic. If you’re doing this and on the highest leverage tasks, then you will get an insane amount more done than everybody else.

4. Body Language

A lot of the times communication is non-verbal and the way you carry yourself is more important than what you say. Strong body language can literally change your physiology and state which people feel. Two minutes of a simple power pose can increase your testosterone levels by 20 percent. Isn’t that remarkable? Make good eye contact, stand up straight, don’t fidget. Those are signals of a confident person that is comfortable with themselves. Study the greats and see how they communicate non-verbally.

“Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.” – Will Smith

5. Energy

Energy management is even more important than time management. You will be more successful if you can sustain high energy levels for a long period of time. To manage your energy in the best way possible, think about the thoughts you are having, how you are moving your body and what your nutrition is like.

6. Attitude

Choose a positive attitude as often as you can. No one wants to be around someone who is negative and negativity doesn’t lead to success. No external event can effect you unless you allow it. Always find the silver lining.

7. Passion

Align yourself with what you love. Passion is one of the things that makes life worth living. When you are passionate about something, it constantly excites you. To truly be great at something, you’re going to have to love it. It’s a tough process to mastery and is near impossible if no passion is there.

8. Being Coachable

Being coachable is one of the keys to success. It’s what was reiterated at a recent seminar I went on. If you’re someone who is always arguing with the guy that is where you want to be, you need to stop. You’re wasting your energy. They’re there for a reason. They have produced results and if you want to produce the same results you need to listen. First emulate and then build your own style. Learn from those who came before you.

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants” – Isaac Newton

9. Doing Extra

If you over deliver people will always remember you. You reap what you sow and that’s what remarkable people do. You always have more left in the tank than you think.

10. Being Prepared

Preparation breeds confidence, which is essential. Whether it’s playing a sport, making a presentation or going on a trip, you need to be well prepared for the task at hand. A lot of the times we see success and we don’t see that most of it is due to preparation. The relentless planning, practice and review. As Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”. This makes you proactive (planning things before they happen) vs reactive (planning things after they happen) which is a way stronger position.

We can do anything in our lifetimes. Absolutely anything we want to and I’m a strong believer in that. I will not let anyone tell me otherwise. It’s up to us though to cultivate the traits needed to achieve what we want. It’s not about degrees or financial status, it’s about your habits. Make no excuses as all of these are in your control so go now and grab life with both hands and actually make it happen!

from
https://addicted2success.com/success-advice/10-things-you-can-start-doing-today-to-succeed-with-zero-talent/

The 3 Meta-Skills You Need to Learn to Achieve Anything in Life

In the world today, the only thing that we are sure of is that it will change. But by the words of Jeff Bezos, we need to focus on the things that won’t change, not on the things that will. And this is where meta-skills come into play. A meta-skill is a higher-order skill that allows other skills to be used and developed. This basically means that in order to master lower level skills, you need to master their common denominator.

So if you can master these 3 meta-skills below, you can achieve almost anything in life:

1. Building Habits

Aristotle used to say “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit,” and Jim Rohn agreed by adding  “Motivation is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going.”

We can find strong proof of the importance of habits everywhere in the world, from business to sports to education and most business books tell us to form habits in this or that. But rarely do we learn how to build habits and are presented with a step-by-step process of doing that.

I’ve read so many books about building habits but most of them lack at least a couple of steps which would help you build a habit. Eventually, I managed to build my own system. This system helped me build a reading and a writing habit and currently, I’m building a health habit with it.

I took the time to learn how to build habits – any habits – and it gave me a massive payoff. I can now build any habit if I want to and this meta-skill will be an invaluable tool for the rest of my life and it can be in yours too. Habits train you to do one single action every single day until it becomes a part of who you are and the next meta-skill perfectly compliments this one.

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” – Jim Rohn

2. Small Actions

Everyone celebrates Elon Musk’s motivation to work 28 hours a day but, I put my focus on a smaller “celebrity” that has:

• Written 5 bestselling books
• Earned a computer science Ph.D. from MIT
• Became a father of three
• Obtained a tenured professorship at Georgetown

And he did all of this while shutting off work at 5:00 p.m. every single day and keeping the weekend just for his family. Oh and I forgot to mention – he did all of this by the age of 33. His name is Cal Newport.

Cal never runs on 100% of his speed because he understands that life isn’t a 100-meter dash, it’s a never-ending marathon and if you go all in the beginning, you will just burn out a couple of kilometers in the race.

Eric Edmeades said, “I do less every single day to do more in a year” and if you can keep doing small everyday actions, they will lead you to achieve mastery in life. The reading habit I started – doing only 20 pages a day – accumulated into 47 books in a year. That is the power of small actions.

3. Self-Awareness

So many books and articles rave about self-awareness today and hail it as one of the strongest meta-skills you can have. When they asked Gary Vaynerchuk what is the one skill people should master today, his response was “Self-Awareness.”

Self-awareness is the ability to consciously understand and know your own character, personality, and feelings. Self-awareness has a couple of layers but it’s best to only go 2 layers deep. You are on Level 0 when you are so long on autopilot that you forget that you’re on autopilot. Level 0 is a level where you have no self-awareness. On level 1 you have some metacognition (you have thoughts about your thoughts) and you think about the thoughts you have in your head. Level 2 is thinking about your mental models (where your thoughts originate and why).

A good example of this is, a guy who you hate from work just pulled a prank on you in front of the entire office. You became mad and as soon as you came home, you had a fight with your wife. On level 0, you just do it. On Level 1 you think “Maybe I’m not mad at my wife at all- this is just the consequence of the guy from work.”  On Level 2 you realize that you don’t need to answer the prank by hating the guy or being angry, just accept that it was just a prank, smile or laugh, and continue with your day.

Self Awareness will help you get better at anything faster, it will help you professionally, personally, and socially; and as soon as you master it, the sooner you can reap the rewards from it.

“Self awareness is one of the rarest of human commodities. I don’t mean self-consciousness where you’re limiting and evaluating yourself. I mean being aware of your own patterns.” – Tony Robbins

In a world where the only constant is change, we need to find and focus on the skills that won’t change. And with that, we have seen 3 meta-skills that we should learn to achieve mastery in our life.

Building habits, taking small actions and being self-aware are the ones that will help us the best. So what are you waiting for? Take control over your life by becoming the master of these 3 meta-skills.

from
https://addicted2success.com/life/the-3-meta-skills-you-need-to-learn-to-achieve-anything-in-life/

4 Unusual Ways to Identify Your Strengths When You’ve Tried Everything Else

Did you ever find it difficult to identify your strengths in life? Many people identify their strengths and weaknesses during the early stages of their lives however, successful leaders can argue that this may need to be the other way around. In other words, we tend to forget about our strengths and how we can effectively use them; and instead, we desperately try to further improve our weaknesses.

We sometimes tend to focus on the negative things we see around us and in turn, miss out on all the positive energy that other people and nature produce for to us enjoy. This is to be expected – not all days are the same and we are human after all. In some cases though, it may simply be because we are not sure of what our best skill set is.

Regardless of the reason, you may find yourself getting stressed out because you can’t seem to understand the things you are performing the best at – instead, you may be noticing your weaknesses. If you are tired of searching for your best strengths as an individual, note that there are ways you can easily find your strengths and weaknesses, without really putting out too much effort.

Below you will see the 4 ways that can help you identify your strengths when you can’t think of anything else to do:

1. Complete A Personality Test

A personality test will help you figure out up to five main personality traits, in addition to other skills you may possess, considering that you aren’t already aware of them. Even though this may not be the perfect solution in knowing what you’re great at, it will help you come closer to the different aspects of your personality. Knowing what your personality is made up of is an essential element for figuring out the suitable career path you may want to take, the right people to hang out with, and the right objectives you should be following.

“Sometimes you don’t realize your own strength until you come face to face with your greatest weakness.” – Susan Gale

2. Take An Aptitude Test

An aptitude test is essentially created to determine a person’s ability in a specific skill or field of knowledge. It will help you understand what skills you excel at by asking a series of questions and based on the answers you provide, it will evaluate which skills you are more fitted to outshine. Make sure to have a proper go at the test as it can positively help you decide which career path is more suitable for you.

3. Receive Feedback

Receiving feedback from friends, family and colleagues is a great way to quickly and easily tap into the different strengths and skills you may have displayed around them in the past. This activity may include a series of questions around you passion, hobbies and previously shown successes.

First, start the conversation by telling them your passion and hobbies, or in other words, the task you can enthusiastically work on for many hours. Ask your friend to outline three to five of your strengths that are somehow related to what you just mentioned; this may include direct strengths but also transferable skills.

Following this, take a minute to device a fictional scenario where you can apply those skills getting you closer to your career goals. Let them know of your thoughts and how you can further employ these in the given setting.

4. Use Numerology

This may be a bit of a controversial suggestion as you might not believe in the overall concept; and that’s absolutely fine. Nevertheless, it would be great to be aware of such an option in case you ever want to give it a try.

Numerology essentially refers to the mystical relationship between a number and specific events in someone’s life. You can check it out to understand more about yourself and maybe find new ways on how you can further grow as an individual.

“In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet often the person can’t switch gears. It’s a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they’re the same thing.” – Steve Jobs

Finding new ways to improve our strengths and skills may indeed seem difficult sometimes, however, approaching this from multiple perspectives can prove to deliver great benefits to both our personal and career development.

Focus on always improving yourself in any way possible – that may be by employing traditional methods or even quickly applying a few or all of the above tips. The important thing is to make sure that you continuously use what works best for you and you will soon see the results of your efforts for yourself. You will come to realise that your strengths have greatly increased in both quantity and quality over time.

from
https://addicted2success.com/life/4-unusual-ways-to-identify-your-strengths-when-youve-tried-everything-else/

How to Have More Money: 5 Secrets You Need to Know to Be Wealthy

Why are some people wealthy, while others struggle to survive, living pay check to pay check?  You can take two people from the same background, even the same family, with the same education and opportunity, and they will get different results. One will succeed, and one will fail. Why? Watching members of my own family get different results even though they were given the same information taught me valuable life lessons about building wealth.

My grandparents were hard-working, blue collar immigrants. They openly shared their good money habits with their four children. They all lived under the same roof and received the same information. Three of the four even had the same career, yet, their results were drastically different. I want to share my observations with you so you can learn what works when creating financial freedom.

Here are 5 proven secrets you need to know to be be wealthy:

1. Be Grateful

My grandparents spoke with love and appreciation for the opportunities available in their new homeland. My parents complained about money even though they earned plenty. Their lack of satisfaction led them to fund their lifestyle with money they didn’t have, accumulating a lot of debt. They fought over money and blamed each other for their results. Their constant bickering caused me unbearable stress. When you show appreciation, you get more of what you want. What are you grateful for today?

Here’s an easy way to show gratitude. Start and end each day stating out loud what you appreciate. It can be your health, family, friends, a thriving business. State your gratitude intention in the present tense. Here is an example…”I am so happy and grateful now that…. and you fill in the blank.

“You must gain control over your money or the lack of it will forever control you.” – Dave Ramsey

2. Be Generous

My grandparents regularly gave to their favorite charities and helped neighbors in need. Having the courage to be generous when you are struggling shows the Universe you’re confident in your ability to create what you need. Where can you show generosity today? How about donating your time, talent or money to a cause that matters to you? Sharing your passion in a special way often provides a renewed sense of purpose that gets your creative juices flowing.

3. Create A Plan and Take Daily Action Toward Your Goals

Only one of my grandparents children had a plan. My uncle and his wife lived within their means and had a lovely lifestyle. He didn’t earn more money than the others. My uncle made choices that gave him better results. His siblings spent more than they made, all the time. They thought they were living the good life, but the stress of being over extended and not having any savings took its toll financially and emotionally.

Do you set goals? Here’s an easy system to stay on track. First, create a written list of your goals and prioritize them. Write each one on 3 x 5 card that you read aloud daily. This will provide triggers that stimulate action. As you hit your targets, check them off your list. You will feel a rush of satisfaction that inspires you to keep going.

4. Have Honest Money Conversations

Nonnie and Grandpa were comfortable talking about money. This is the secret successful people have in common. Money doesn’t make them uncomfortable. They are comfortable with money. Developing a comfort level with money starts with knowing how to talk about it without getting emotional.

To have a successful money conversation, start small. Think of a money topic that is light, such as planning a vacation. If you have someone that is part of the planning process, make a vacation planning date with them. Start with general questions like where to go, when, and for how long. Once you’ve narrowed down your options, decide on a budget. Once this system becomes second nature, money conversations will be a breeze.

“Never spend your money before you have earned it.” – Thomas Jefferson

5. Live Within Your Means and Include Savings In Your Budget

My grandparents didn’t earn a lot of money in their day. Because they managed well and were consistent savers, they left their children a small inheritance when they passed. In contrast, one of their children died penniless. One lost everything and is living in government housing for the elderly. One had to downsize considerably, barely hanging on financially.

Their one child that copied their money habits retired comfortably. He enjoys financial freedom, experiencing life on his terms. His outcome proves your decisions and behavior create your results, not the size of your pay check.

What money choices will you make? This is essential – know your numbers. Use an online app or a spreadsheet. Include your take-home (net) income and any other income sources (dividends, interest, etc.).

Next list your expenses. Separate them by essential, and discretionary categories. Include savings in your budget. If you want to increase your savings, look for ways to reduce your discretionary expenses. Don’t forget subscription expenses. These are often overlooked and can add up fast. If you have subscriptions to goods or services you’re not using, consider cancelling them to save money.

As you can see, achieving the level of wealth and financial freedom isn’t as difficult as you might think. If you practice these 5 simple habits, you will be on your way to attain your money goals. Remember, live your life by design and not by default.

from
https://addicted2success.com/success-advice/how-to-have-more-money-5-secrets-you-need-to-know-to-be-wealthy/